T.S. Eliot - "The Waste Land," 100 Years Later
In which, T.S. Eliot is in the news via The New Yorker
This week, I saw an article in The New Yorker about T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100 years old. Anthony Lane’s article, “The Shock and Aftershock of ‘The Waste Land’” is subtitled “T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece is a hundred years old, but it has never stopped sounding new.”
I’ve waited all year for the articles about The Waste Land to appear. In October 2018, I started writing about my brother, a born-again hippie turned evangelical preacher who founded churches for the deaf in the Pacific Northwest. Then he was stricken with the curse of Job, suicidally depressed with major depressive disorder. In and out of institutions for 13 years, he finally jumped to his death from the Fremont Bridge, in Portland, Oregon. I was 10 years his junior, but by all other accounts, we were very much alike. I looked over my shoulder for years to see if the specter of his illness would strike me down. A year into writing about my brother, I realized that I was writing a memoir - and all the pieces fell together. I dusted off my copy of The Waste Land, in the small book of Eliot’s poems that I had with my original marginalia from my undergrad days, and saw with crystal clarity how to write my book. The Waste Land would serve as the scaffold upon which to hang my story.
I first studied The Waste Land as an undergraduate with Professor Louis Owens at CSU Northridge. Professor Owens would go on to become an eminent Steinbeck scholar and Native American novelist before he committed suicide in 2002. He was my mentor, the professor who inspired me to a life of letters, langugage, and literature. I didn’t know at the time just how influential he would become in my life, just as I didn’t know how influential Eliot’s The Waste Land would become. At that time, The Waste Land was 60 years old, and I was a green 18 year old, a sophomore in college.
Eliot was a well-known figure in our house, as my sister, almost 7 years my senior, studied poetry and named her first dog, a golden retriever, Eliot. I remember her studying Prufrock with his “coffee spoons” and the women coming and going. There was something musical and magical in the words. Maybe it was just that our house was filled with grandmothers coming and going from room to room and the endless pots of coffee and tea that they drank from sunup until well after midnight.
Professor Owens taught a course on waste land literature, featuring novels that use The Waste Land mythology as its primary metaphor, such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Malamud’s The Natural, and Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. But what I remember best is Owens reading in his baritone voice from Eliot’s poem, bringing it alive for us in class. Owens had a reputation much like Professor Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the women sat up front enthralled by him as he read. I sat in the back and listened to the words swirl around in front of me, magically creating a literary world out of thin air.
What I didn’t know at that time was just how much my life would come to resemble The Waste Land. If I had never studied The Waste Land, would my life become the analogue pattern of it?
In almost all of the depressing literature that we read, Professor Owens found the light that extolled virtue. For Eliot’s masterpiece, it always felt as if it was Owens who posited the way out of the waste land (which is why his suicide shook me so much). So I learned to read Eliot’s poem in a positive way, a way to overcome whatever obstacles were in one’s path, a way to forge a path forward through desolation and despair to arrive at the other side, where the rains fall onto fertile lands.
The geographical West, as well as the political West, suffers from severe physical as well as moral and ethical drought, and the rains have largely given way to heat and catastrophic storms. Rivers are drying up, snowpack is depleting, glaciers are melting away. Records for high temperatures are falling regularly as heat rises throughout the earth. This is nature’s way of bringing Eliot’s The Waste Land to life, just as my own life’s patterns serve as an exemplar for The Waste Land.
When I first thought to use The Waste Land as the scaffold for my own memoir, it occurred to me that the 100th anniversary of its publication was coming soon. I know that publication of books takes a year to 18 months to 2 years or so. I had little time to waste. But timing in my life has never been my strong suit. The writing process also has a mind of its own. I worked steadily on my book for several years, but I took two well-needed 6 month breaks, amounting to a year of lost time. It wasn’t lost, of course, as my mind was percolating how to compose several sections of my book, navigating the emotional landmines that such a memoir would entail.
In the fall of 2021, I could smell the end of my book, and I knew that 2022 was coming fast, the celebratory year of The Waste Land. I raced ahead and finished the book as best but as quickly as I could, broad strokes and outlines. Then I went back and filled in all the details. In December 2021, I called the book done: 203,000 words with notes sections and appendices of about 60 pages, some 740 pages of text in all.
All available information to me said memoirs get published in the less than 100,000 word quantity. I had written two books!
I signed up for the Atlanta Writer’s Conference in May 2022, incentive to edit my book to size. By mid-January, I finished my book again, deleting the appendices and reducing the copy to 168,000 words. Okay, so maybe an exception could be made because of the notes section, a play on Eliot’s own notes in his poem. But the advice I got was solid: any query letter in which the word count exceeds 100,000 words for a memoir was likely to be rejected out of hand. Several months to go, and my work took on greater urgency. I had to submit a query letter and sample manuscript pages for review at the conference in March. In my query letter, I labeled the book at 98,000 words and then set out for the next two months to reach that goal.
Like a master sculptor, I went through my book again, cutting and shaping, cutting and cutting, cutting and polishing - did I mention cutting? - until I reached my goal. The text was 98,000 words. I still had 6,000 words in my notes so the document is 104,000 words. And here I rested, one day before the conference began.
I’ve learned a lot in writing a book. Taking a high brow literary source as the scaffold for one’s memoir may not be the winning formula that one would think. But my book is solid. It’s not that I found in The Waste Land the organizing principle for my life’s story. It’s more that my life became the analogue version of The Waste Land. I’m nearing the end of this journey, though I keep looking for ways to improve my writing. I may be able to edit more from sections 3 and 5, which comprises the bulk of the story.
But the book as it stands with its bones built upon The Waste Land tells my story, a life diverted from extreme dysfunction and mental illness of others to a story of hope and a way out of the waste land.
I’m at work on my next book, as I continue to tinker with My Own Private Waste Land. I am actively querying and seeking agent representation for my book. It’s solid and has a solid audience.
To help with my efforts to seek traditional publication, if you could subscribe to this substack and share it with others who may be interested, I write about:
memoir
writing
writing memoir
T.S. Eliot
mental illness - major depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissitic personality disorder, suicide
The Waste Land and other waste land literature
Thank you for reading. As fall approaches, bundle up and keep the home fires burning.
For me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Lee G. Hornbrook taught college English for 25 years and is an expert in the writing process. He is the editor of The Writing Prof on Medium. Now he’s a memoirist, freelance writer, and writing coach.